Invictus
by
William Ernest Henley (1849-1903)
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
Type of Work and Year of Publication
...... “Invictus” is a *lyric poem in four quatrains (four-line stanzas). William Ernest Henley wrote it in 1875 but did not publish it until 1892 in a collection entitled Echoes.
*Lyric Poetry (1) Poetry that presents the deep feelings and emotions of the poet as opposed to poetry that tells a story or presents a witty observation. Sonnets, odes, and elegies are examples of lyric poems. William Wordsworth, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and William Blake are among the poets who wrote lyrics. Shakespeare's sonnets are lyric poems, although his verse plays are not; they tell a story. Lyric poetry often has a pleasing musical quality. (2) Poetry that can be set to music. The word lyric derives from the Greek word for lyre, a stringed instrument in use since ancient times.http://www.cummingsstudyguides.net/xLitTerms.html
Title and Dedication
...... “Invictus” is Latin for unconquerable, invincible, undefeated. Henley dedicated the poem to Robert Thomas Hamilton Bruce (1846-1899), a Scottish flour merchant. After Hamilton Bruce's death, published collections of Henley's poems often included either of these dedication lines preceding the poem: “I.M.R.T. Hamilton Bruce” or “In Memoriam R.T.H.B.” (“In Memory of Robert Thomas Hamilton Bruce”). The surname Hamilton Bruce is sometimes spelled with a hyphen (Hamilton-Bruce).
Theme
...... The theme of the poem is the will to survive in the face of a severe test. Henley himself faced such a test. After contracting tuberculosis of the bone in his youth, he suffered a tubercular infection when he was in his early twenties that resulted in amputation of a leg below the knee. When physicians informed him that he must undergo a similar operation on the other leg, he enlisted the services of Dr. Joseph Lister (1827-1912), the developer of antiseptic medicine. He saved the leg. During Henley's twenty-month ordeal between 1873 and 1875 at the Royal Edinburgh Infirmary in Scotland, he wrote “Invictus” and other poems. Years later, his friend Robert Louis Stevenson based the character Long John Silver (a peg-legged pirate in the Stevenson novel Treasure Island) on Henley.
A Poem Praised and Ridiculed
...... "Invictus" appears in prestigious anthologies, including Modern British Poetry (New York, Harcourt, 1920). Not a few poetry enthusiasts regard it as an inspiring work. Winston Churchill and Nelson Mandela both recited from it to stir their listeners. So did Martin Luther King Jr. The Republican candidate in the 2008 U.S. Presidential election, Senator John McCain,committed it to memory in his youth, according to a New York Times Op-Ed article by William Kristol (January 21, 2008). In Best Remembered Poems, Martin Gardner writes, “The poem is a favorite of secular humanists who see themselves and the human race as unconquerable masters of their fate in a mindless universe that cares not a fig for what happens to them.” (Mineola, N.Y.: Courier Dover Publications, 1992).
...... Nevertheless, many critics ridicule the poem as mediocre at best, and most modern anthologies refuse to admit it to their pages. One reason for the snubbing is the poem's seemingly melodramatic tone, like that of a windy politician declaiming from a soapbox. Another reason is its singsong versification.
...... However, the poem lives on despite the criticism and despite its disappearance from poetry texts. For one thing, it has a ring that makes it quotable, a quality lacking in many rhymeless verses today. (Musicality was a sine qua non of many great nineteenth-century poets, including Poe, Tennyson, and Wordsworth.) For another, it is unabashedly straightforward in an age when poets lard their verses with prolix ambiguity and nebulous allusions.
...... So is “Invictus”good or bad?
...... Jazz composer Duke Ellington (1899-1974) has been quoted as saying of music, “If it sounds good, it is good.” To some poetry enthusiasts, “Invictus” is a rousing paean; to others, it is just noise.
Invictus
By William Ernest Henley
1
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
Comments, Stanza 1
Night is a metaphor for suffering of any kind. It is also part of a simile and a hyperbole in which the speaker compares the darkness of his suffering to the blackness of a hellish pit stretching from the north pole to the south pole. In line 4, unconquerable establishes the theme and a link with the title (Latin for unconquerable).
Stanza (Italian, ‘a stopping place’):
a group of verses separated from other such groups in a poem and often sharing a common rhyme scheme.
Metaphor:
a comparison that is made literally, either by a verb or, less obviously, by a combination of adjective and noun, noun and verb, etc., but in any case without pointing out a similarity by using words such as "as," "like," or "than."
2
In the fell clutch of circumstance 5
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Comments, Stanza 2
This stanza begins with another metaphor, comparing circumstance to a creature with a deadly grip (fell clutch). Alliteration occurs in clutch, circumstance, and cried, in not and nor, and in bludgeonings, bloody, but, and unbowed.
Alliteration:
using the same consonant to start two or more stressed words or syll= ables in a phrase or verse line, or using a series of vowels to begin such words or syllables in sequence. Alliteration need not re-use all initial consonants: words like "train" and "terrific" alliterate.
3
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade, 10
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
Comments, Stanza 3
In line 10, shade is a metaphor for death. In this same line, horror suggests that the speaker believes in an afterlife in spite of the seemingly agnostic third line of the first stanza. If there were no afterlife, there could be no horror after death. Menace of the years is a metaphor for advancing age.
ag·nos·tic/ægˈnɒstɪk/ Show Spelled[ag-nos-tik] Show IPA
–noun
1. a person who holds that the existence of the ultimate cause, as God, and the essential nature of things are unknown and unknowable, or that human knowledge is limited to experience.
2. a person who denies or doubts the possibility of ultimate knowledge in some area of study.
–adjective
3. of or pertaining to agnostics or agnosticism.
4. asserting the uncertainty of all claims to knowledge.
4
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate: 15
I am the captain of my soul.
Comments, Stanza 1
Here, strait means narrow, restricted. To escape from “the fell clutch of circumstance” and “bludgeonings of chance,” the speaker must pass through a narrow gate. He believes he can do so—in spite of the punishments that fate has allotted him—because his iron will refuses to bend.
Study Questions and Essay Topics
1. Read the paragraphs under "A Poem Praised and Ridiculed." Then write a short essay arguing that the poem is worthy of praise or deserving of ridicule.
2. What is the meaning of chance (line 7)?
3..The word charged (line 14) has several meanings. What does the author intend it to mean?
4. Do you believe that you are the master of your fate (line 15)? Or do your genes, your environment, and other factors place your fate outside of your control? Present your opinion in a short essay.
http://www.cummingsstudyguides.net/Guides7/Invictus.html
Biography of William Ernest Henley/
William Ernest Henley (August 23, 1849 - July 11, 1903) was a British poet, critic and editor.
Henley was born in Gloucester and educated at the Crypt Grammar School. The school was a poor relation of the Cathedral School, and Henley indicated its shortcomings in his article (Pall Mall Magazine, Nov. 1900) on T. E. Brown the poet, who was headmaster there for a brief period. Brown's appointment was a stroke of luck for Henley, for whom it represented a first acquaintance with a man of genius. "He was singularly kind to me at a moment when I needed kindness even more than I needed encouragement." Brown did him the essential service of lending him books. Henley was no classical scholar, but his knowledge and love of literature were vital.
After suffering tuberculosis as a boy, he found himself, in 1874, aged twenty-five, an inmate of the hospital at Edinburgh. From there he sent to the Cornhill Magazine where he wrote poems in irregular rhythms, describing with poignant force his experiences in hospital. Leslie Stephen, then editor, visited his contributor in hospital and took Robert Louis Stevenson, another recruit of the Cornhill, with him. The meeting between Stevenson and Henley, and the friendship of which it was the beginning, form one of the best-known episodes in English literature (see Stevenson's letter to Mrs Sitwell, Jan. 1875, and Henley's poems "An Apparition" and "Envoy to Charles Baxter").
In 1877 Henley went to London and began his editorial career by editing London, a journal written for the sake of its contributors rather than the public. Among other distinctions it first gave to the world The New Arabian Nights of Stevenson. Henley himself contributed a series of verses chiefly in old French forms. He had been writing poetry since 1872, but (so he told the world in his “ advertisement” to his collected Poems, 1898) he “found himself about 1877 so utterly unmarketable that he had to own himself beaten in art and to addict himself to journalism for the next ten years.” When London folded, he edited the Magazine of Art from 1882 to 1886. At the end of that period he came into the public eye as a poet. In 1887 Gleeson White made for the popular series of Canterbury Poets (edited by William Sharp) a selection of poems in old French forms. In his selection Gleeson White included many pieces from London, and only after completing the selection did he discover that the verses were all by Henley. In the following year, HB Donkin in his volume Voluntaries, written for an East End hospital, included Henley's unrhymed rhythms quintessentializing the poet's memories of the old Edinburgh Infirmary. Alfred Nutt read these, and asked for more; and in 1888 his firm published A Book of Verse.
Henley was by this time well known within a restricted literary circle, and the publication of this volume determined his fame as a poet, which rapidly outgrew these limits, two new editions of the volume being printed within three years. In this same year (1888) Fitzroy Bell started the Scots Observer in Edinburgh, with Henley as literary editor, and early in 1889 Bell left the conduct of the paper to him. It was a weekly review on the lines of the old Saturday Review, but inspired in every paragraph by the vigorous and combative personality of the editor. It was transferred to London as the National Observer, and remained under Henley's editorship until 1893. Though, as Henley confessed, the paper had almost as many writers as readers, and its fame was mainly confined to the literary class, it was a lively and influential feature of the literary life of its time. Henley had the editor's great gift of discerning promise, and the "Men of the Scots Observer," as Henley affectionately and characteristically called his band of contributors, in most instances justified his insight. The paper found utterance for the growing imperialism of its day, and among other services to literature gave to the world Rudyard Kipling's Barrack-Room Ballads.
http://www.poemhunter.com/william-ernest-henley/biography/